As you all know, as soon as AI gets a single tick past human intelligence, it’s going to take over the world and exterminate homo sapiens.

At least, that’s what a lot of people assume.  Will that happen?  Your guess is as good as Sam Altman’s.

Meanwhile, we have two confirmed victims of AI, both of which are household names in the IT community.

Farewell, Crucial

It’s hard not to take this one personally, given that I built a Crucial gaming PC a couple years ago and it’s been wonderful ever since, and I’ve often bought Crucial-branded RAM.

Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), a leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, today announced its decision to exit the Crucial consumer business, including the sale of Crucial consumer-branded products at key retailers, e-tailers and distributors worldwide.

Aw, man!  Why?

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology.

In other words, why deal with millions of consumers when you can instead deal with a few hyperscalers placing huge orders.

This is a result of the RAM shortage, which is in turn caused by the massive AI hype cycle buildout.

And Fare Thee Not So Well, Despised MinIO

We’ve covered MinIO’s recent sticking of the middle finger to its customers and userbase.  It’s stripped out features to force people into a commercial model.

But now the project is apparently being abandoned altogether.

Here’s the latest on their GitHub:

**This project is currently under maintenance and is not accepting new changes.**

– The codebase is in a maintenance-only state
– No new features, enhancements, or pull requests will be accepted
– Critical security fixes may be evaluated on a case-by-case basis
– Existing issues and pull requests will not be actively reviewed
– Community support continues on a best-effort basis through [Slack](https://slack.min.io)

And guess what they recommend:

For enterprise support and actively maintained versions, please see MinIO AIStor.

“AIStor”.  LOL.

Easy Money

The TLDR from all of this is that there’s so much money swimming around in the AI hype bubble that companies are abandoning their traditional markets in order to focus on grabbing a slice of that pie.  OpenAI alone is on the hook for $1.4 trillion+ of AI spend, and there’s also Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and more.  Those are the top drivers, and then downstream are Nvidia, Oracle, server makers and suppliers, and a lot more.

With so much easy green being spent as rapidly as possible, who has time for consumers and freemium models?

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.